Status of Women Minister Kellie Leitch has unveiled a blueprint to boost women on corporate boards of directors.

Published on Wed Jul 02 2014

Women make up 47 per cent of the Canadian workforce, yet they hold just 10 per cent of the seats on the boards of private companies. It is not that they lack education, training or corporate experience. Nor can chief executives continue to claim women haven’t had time to reach the top. Two generations of female managers and professionals have come of age since the women’s revolution in the 1960s.

Women’s Minister Kellie Leitch, an accomplished pediatrician with an MBA, has given them a sharp prod last week. Last week, she set a target of 30 per cent female board representation within five years. Although the goal is voluntary, the minister intends to back it up with monitoring, moral suasion and political pressure.

In fact, there is already a fair bit of momentum. In Quebec, 52.4 per cent of corporate seats are held by women, thanks to a 2006 provincial law making gender equality mandatory within five years. Six months ago, the Ontario Securities Commission, introduced guidelines requiring publicly traded companies be required to disclose their targets for boosting the number in women in senior executive positions and on their boards of directors and outline their plans to get there. The chartered banks, the telecommunications industry, the major airlines and railways and the public sector are moving toward gender parity. And Catalyst, a non-profit organization has been lobbying business to achieve 25-per-cent female representation on corporate boards by 2017.

But there are still hold-outs. As Leitch pointed out, 40 per cent of the country’s top 500 corporations have no women at all on their boards. Clearly she is not convinced that the passage of time will be enough to loosen the grip of the old boys’ club on corporate directorships.

The minister did not pick her target out of the air. It was recommended to her by an advisory council appointed two years ago when the government pledged in its budget to get more women into corporate boardrooms. The panel’s report, Good for Business, suggested 30 per cent as a five-year way station on the road to full gender balance.

The council, made up of 26 corporate heavyweights such as Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta Corporation; John Ferguson, board chair of Suncor, former auditor general Sheila Fraser, who now serves as a corporate director of Bombardier Inc., and former finance minister John Manley, who now heads the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, did not call for quotas or sanctions. It urged the government to take the lead by appointing more women to federal agencies and Crown corporations and providing accurate information about the availability of female candidates to private companies.

Leitch endorsed that approach. “It takes leadership – a nudge and a push and making sure that there are timelines and reporting,” she said.

There were a few discordant notes in her announcement. She congratulated her own government for doing “outstandingly well” in promoting woman. “We do way better than corporate Canada: 31 per cent of governor-in-council appointments are women right now and we’re aspiring higher,” she boasted. In fact, Canada lags behind many countries – from Sweden to South Africa – in moving women up the corporate ladder.

She insisted that Justice Minister Peter MacKay, heavily criticized for attributing the dearth of female judges in Canada to the bond between women and their children, had “championed many women” who are now serving on the bench. She told reporters the timing of her announcement had nothing to do with the negative publicity swirling around her cabinet colleague.

And she focused solely on highest echelon of the corporate hierarchy, when millions of working women are paid less than their male counterparts, trapped in precarious part-time jobs and penalized for taking time off to care for sick children or aging parents.

Leitch’s attention to the gender imbalance in Canada’s corporate boardrooms is welcome. But the vast majority of women will never reach that level. They are the ones who need an advocate in Ottawa most.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.